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The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science Advance Access originally published online on July 24, 2009
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 2009 60(4):721-736; doi:10.1093/bjps/axp032
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© The Author (2009). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of British Society for the Philosophy of Science. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Are Linguists Better Subjects?

Jennifer Culbertson

Department of Cognitive Science, Johns Hopkins University, 3400 N. Charles St. Baltimore, MD 21218, USA culbertson{at}cogsci.jhu.edu

Steven Gross

Department of Philosophy, Johns Hopkins University, 3400 N. Charles St. Baltimore, MD 21218, USA sgross11{at}jhu.edu


  Abstract

Who are the best subjects for judgment tasks intended to test grammatical hypotheses? Michael Devitt ([2006a], [2006b]) argues, on the basis of a hypothesis concerning the psychology of such judgments, that linguists themselves are. We present empirical evidence suggesting that the relevant divide is not between linguists and non-linguists, but between subjects with and without minimally sufficient task-specific knowledge. In particular, we show that subjects with at least some minimal exposure to or knowledge of such tasks tend to perform consistently with one another—greater knowledge of linguistics makes no further difference—while at the same time exhibiting markedly greater in-group consistency than those who have no previous exposure to or knowledge of such tasks and their goals.

  1. Introduction
  2. Background and Clarification
  3. Previous Experiments
  4. Our Experiment
  5. The Context of Devitt's Claim and His Psychological Model
Appendix


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